From the Newsstand
April 6, 2008
Experiments in Publishing 4
by C. Max Magee
HarperCollins is trying a new model with an imprint that cuts out author advances in favor of a larger proportion of royalties and eliminates remainders (also known as returns) entirely. The industry has been debating the pros and cons of the move since the Friday announcement. As has been only sparsely discussed in the media, [...]
March 13, 2008
Borders and the Froot Loop Gambit 14
by C. Max Magee
A recent Wall Street Journal story (I’ll summarize here if you can’t access it), is reporting that Borders intends to “sharply [increase] the number of titles it displays on shelves with the covers face-out.” It is hoped that this move will increase sales, but “the new approach will require a typical Borders superstore to shrink [...]
March 10, 2008
Deeper into the Quicksand 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Today’s Elliot Spitzer scandal sent me back to the New Yorker archives, to revisit Nick Paumgarten’s excellent profile, from December 10. This time around, I was struck less by the “what you see is what you get” thesis of some Spitzer intimates, than by this proposition, from an unnamed source: “Spitzer lunges. He seems not [...]
March 9, 2008
Amazon Spends Millions on Beedle the Bard 1
by C. Max Magee
Amazon has locked down a rare piece of Harry Potter ephemera far a tidy sum. We’re incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry [...]
March 4, 2008
Fiction is the New Non-Fiction 4
by Emre Peker
If con artists were smarter, they’d let people forget previous deeds first. Little more than two years after the James Frey debacle, the literature world is once again awash in breaking news stories of fabricated memoirs. The New York Times reported Monday that Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years is complete bogus. [...]
March 1, 2008
Nicholson Baker’s Wikipedia Contributions 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, the novelist Nicholson Baker offers a charming encomium to Wikipedia. Baker knows whereof he speaks – he reveals that he’s been a prolific Wikipedia contributor. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, we at The Millions were able to chase down an archive of [...]
